Remembering Nancy Reagan, 1921-2016

Although time finally caught up with Nancy Reagan, who died on Sunday morning at the age of 94, history will be kind to her. The former first lady’s passing was greeted with almost universal admiration for her style, her devotion to her husband, and her good sense.

It wasn’t always so. If you were around in the 1980s, you’ll remember that Mrs. Reagan—she never styled herself a Ms.—was far from a universally admired figure. She was assailed for accepting expensive gowns at the beginning of her husband’s first term. She was derided for having an astrologist, Joan Quigly, and for bringing such quackery into the White House. She was pitilessly mocked, especially by the young, for her “Just say no” speeches on drugs. Like many wives of famous or powerful men—think Yoko Ono—she became a target of many who, rather than attribute failings to her husband, preferred to think she was some sort of she-devil. The first lady was often characterized as cold and off-putting while the president seemed warm and enveloping. In truth, he was the cool and distant one, a man whose own son said that other people, including his kids, ceased to exist for him once they were out of his presence.

The journalist Lou Cannon famously dubbed Reagan’s presidency “the role of a lifetime.” This was actually even truer of Nancy Reagan’s work as first lady. Where her Ronny had had a considerable, if unspectacular Hollywood career, Nancy Davis (née Anne Frances Robbins) was a minor actress. She appeared in a handful of films and by the time she met her future husband was already being shunted into character roles. She was one of those starlets who was never going to be a star, at least not in the movies. Yet her experience as an actress served her well during all those years where she had to sit in public being a political wife. Thin, with good cheekbones, and big, wide-set eyes set in an unreadable stare, she would just exist, gracefully, for hour after hour, always enhancing her husband.

Her loyalty was extraordinary. In the early reaction to Mrs. Reagan’s death, you heard her marriage described as “a great love story.” No doubt it was, but love stories take many forms. Given what one knows about how emotionally unreachable her husband often was—another way he was referred to was the Teflon President—her love for him was all the more remarkable. She looked after him through the thick of political success and the thin of his battle with Alzheimer’s. Her speech about this to the 1996 Republican convention was more touching than anything she had ever done in Hollywood. She moved everyone, including this jaded reporter, to tears.

More important in historical terms, she became perhaps the president’s closest advisor. Not only was she known for playing the bad cop in the White House, protecting Ronny from those who tried to maneuver him toward their own ends—even chiefs of staff crossed her at their peril—but in case after case, she was his best advisor. It was Nancy who kept him from going after abortion rights (an issue he didn’t care about). It was Nancy who kept pushing him to speak out forcefully about AIDS (he didn’t like thinking about such things). It was Nancy who pushed a diplomatic solution in Nicaragua (he, alas, didn’t listen). And above all, it was Nancy who urged him to go beyond Cold War rhetoric—most of his advisors were utter hard-liners—and find a peacemaking approach with the Soviet Union and Mikhail Gorbachev. Even as she was being called silly, brittle, and elitist, she was pushing her husband toward wiser, more humane positions.

It is one of those historical truisms that first ladies are so often kinder and warmer souls than the presidents they are married to. And so it was with Nancy Reagan, who, playing her role until the end, leaves the stage with an actress’s immaculate sense of timing. Her re-emergence into the news on this particular election-year Sunday could hardly seem more opportune. It feels like a grand cosmic rebuke to the vulgarity and ideological stridency on display in a Republican campaign whose candidates ritually genuflect before Ronald Reagan, then begin pulling out the mud pies. One imagines the elegant Mrs. Reagan shuddering.